What is Education for? Situating History, Cultural Understandings and Studies of Society and Environment against Neo-Conservative Critiques of Curriculum Reform

This paper explores some of debates about the nature and purpose of education in the social sciences in the Australian curriculum. It examines recent attempts in studies of society and environment and history curriculum to prepare students for global citizenship and responds to neo-conservative critiques that our "politically correct" curricula does not impart the "truth" about our "European" heritage. This paper argues that while the neo-conservative discourse makes claim to traditional views of knowledge and rationality, its discursive field does not address the broader questions of what sort of education our students require for the twenty-first century

Systems of Systems Engineering Thesaurus Approach: From Concept to Realisation

The developing discipline of Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) is gaining attention in an increasingly broad range of domains; however, each domain comes with its own set of terms and concepts so that there may be confusion between different domains ostensibly engaged in similar challenges. SoSE is faced with concept multiplicity (one term, more than one concept) and term multiplicity (one concept, more than one term). It is unrealistic to expect long-established domains to simply change ontology to match with other domains, but a means of recognising related concepts and terms across domains and across industrial sectors will enable more rapid progress to be made in the development of SoSE. The approach taken to generating a thesaurus, through which such relationships can be documented, is presented. The approach is essentially consultative among SoSE experts and the current version of the thesaurus is available online. A combination of problem statement definition and logical decomposition has been used; the method is described and application is illustrated using well-known terms

System of Systems Perspective on Risk: Towards a Unified Concept

Many systems and projects that concern systems engineers, engineering managers, and business managers today can be defined as system of systems (SoS), which are described as ambiguous, uncertain and dynamic, among others. In addition to the traditional view on risk identification, analysis and management, the concept of risk should be considered with respect to these systems of systems. The purpose of this paper is to analyse both fundamental concepts and recent publications in system of systems, business and engineering management, as well as risk analysis, modelling, and management for the purpose of better describing the concept of risk with respect to system of systems. The ultimate goal is to provide engineering and business managers the necessary perspective on the concept of risk and its management for the next generation of systems – including various descriptions of risk and discussion of the relevance of properties of system of systems to sustainable management of risks in engineered systems. To achieve a truly sustainable management of risk, there has to be a change in paradigm from a traditional description of risk to that of a more holistic perspective

Systems of systems engineering thesaurus approach: from concept to realisation

The developing discipline of Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) is gaining attention in an increasingly broad range of domains; however, each domain comes with its own set of terms and concepts so that there may be confusion between different domains ostensibly engaged in similar challenges. SoSE is faced with concept multiplicity (one term, more than one concept) and term multiplicity (one concept, more than one term). It is unrealistic to expect long-established domains to simply change ontology to match with other domains, but a means of recognising related concepts and terms across domains and across industrial sectors will enable more rapid progress to be made in the development of SoSE. The approach taken to generating a thesaurus, through which such relationships can be documented, is presented. The approach is essentially consultative among SoSE experts and the current version of the thesaurus is available online. A combination of problem statement definition and logical decomposition has been used; the method is described and application is illustrated using well-known term

The implementation of international geospatial standards for earth and space sciences

The Earth and Space Sciences Informatics division of European Geosciences Union (EGU) and the Open Geospatial Consortium jointly organised a special event entitled: 'Implementation of international geospatial standards for earth and space sciences event' - at the EGU General Assembly meeting held in Vienna, April 2009. The event objectives included: (a) to discuss the integration of information systems from different geosciences disciplines; (b) to promote and discuss the present process to scale from specific and monolithic systems towards independent and modular enabling infrastructures - forming an earth system science (ESS) infrastructure; and (c) to show some of the latest advances in implementing open standards. This manuscript introduces the event motivations and describes the abstract and holistic framework, which can be used to situate the topics and the developments presented by the event speakers. This manuscript introduces important, and relatively new technologies to build a multi-disciplinary geosciences information system: the System of Systems approach and the Model Driven Approach. To achieve that, three important information infrastructure categories are recognised: (a) ESS information infrastructure; (b) geospatial information infrastructure; and (c) distributed information infrastructure. Digital Earth should support the discussed framework to accelerate information transfer from theoretical discussions to applications, in all fields related to global climate change, natural disaster prevention and response, new energy-source development, agricultural and food security, and urban planning and management

International instructional systems: social studies

This paper reports on research conducted as part of the International Instructional System Study that explored five subject areas across nine jurisdictions in six high-performing countries. The Study’s overall aim was to understand what, if anything, there is in common in the curricula and assessment arrangements among the high-performing jurisdictions to see if there are aspects of instructional system design that might account, in part, for high performance. This paper focuses on social studies which in most jurisdictions includes elements of history, geography and citizenship and highlights a number of emerging issues. These include the advantages and disadvantages of teaching history and geography separately or within a social studies programme; the extent to which key concepts are embedded within the social studies/history/geography curricula; whether the level of demand should be considered in terms of a generic taxonomy or in terms of subject specific models; how progression might be defined and considerations of an appropriate balance between teacher assessment and external assessment

A state-wide systems approach to embedding the learning and teaching of sustainability in teacher education

[Extract] Education systems have a key role to play in preparing future citizens to engage in sustainable living practices and help create a more sustainable world. Many schools throughout Australia have begun to develop whole-school approaches to sustainability education that are supported by national and state policies and curriculum frameworks. Pre-service teacher education, however, lags behind in the effort to build the capacity of new teachers to initiate and implement such approaches (Steele, 2010). Evidence suggests this is because there is limited or no core environmental or sustainability knowledge or pedagogy in pre- and in-service courses and programs available to teachers in a thorough and systematic fashion

A semantically-enriched goal-oriented requirements engineering framework for systems of systems using the i* framework applied to cancer care

In recent years, monolithic systems are being composed into bigger systems as Systems of Systems (SoSs). This evolution of SoS raises several software engineering key challenges, such as the management of emerging inconsistent goals and requirements, which may occur among the various Constituent Systems (CSs) themselves, as well as between the entire SoS and the participating CSs. Another significant challenge is that Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) involves more stakeholders than traditional systems engineering, i.e. stakeholders at the SoS-level and the CS-level, where each CS has its own needs and objectives which establish a complex stakeholder environment. To respond to these challenges, this research is aimed at investigating the implications of applying a goal-oriented requirements engineering approach in identifying, modelling and managing emerging goals and their conflicts in SoS context. The key artefact of this research is the development of a Semantically-Enriched Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering Framework for Systems of Systems using the i* framework, namely the OntoSoS.GORE framework.The OntoSoS.GORE is a three-layered framework designed, developed, demonstrated and then evaluated through following multiple iterations of the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) phases, to accomplish the following main objectives: (1) identifying and modelling the SoS global goals and the CSs local goals at different levels of an SoS using the i* framework, in which a new process to extract i* modelling elements from existing user documentation is proposed; (2) maintaining the consistency and integrity of SoS goals at multiple levels through developing a semantic Goals Referential Integrity (sGRI) model in SoS context which consists of an SoSGRI model and an ontology-based model; and (3) managing any conflicts that may occur amongst goals at both the SoS-level and the CS-level, by developing and applying a new goal conflict management approach in SoS context, which consists of two main processes: goal conflict detection and goal conflict resolution.The research framework has been instantiated and validated by applying a real Cancer Care case study at King Hussein Cancer Center (KHCC), Amman, Jordan. Results revealed the effectiveness of applying the framework compared to the current approach applied at KHCC, in terms of addressing higher consistency, completeness and correctness with regard to goal management and conflict management in SoS context. Moreover, the framework provides automation of the processes of following the satisfaction of goals and goals’ conflict management at multiple SoS levels, instead of the manual approach applied currently at KHCC. This automation is accomplished through developing a strategic goal-oriented management tool that is anticipated to be delivered and utilised at KHCC, as well as applying it to other SoS organisations as a proposed solution for goal and conflict management. Another contribution to the Cancer Care and SoS domains is developing a reference i* goal-oriented model for access to Cancer Care which provides a wider system engineering perspective and offers an accessible level of abstraction about Cancer Care goals and their dependencies for stakeholders and domain experts. The reference model provides standardisation of common generic concepts about the domain, in which other Cancer Care organisations can considerably reuse to facilitate the process of capturing and specifying goals and requirements for their practice and validating choices among alternative designs

A semantics-based approach to sensor data segmentation in real-time Activity Recognition

Department of Information Engineering, Dalian University, China The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Activity Recognition (AR) is key in context-aware assistive living systems. One challenge in AR is the segmentation of observed sensor events when interleaved or concurrent activities of daily living (ADLs) are performed. Several studies have proposed methods of separating and organising sensor observations and recognise generic ADLs performed in a simple or composite manner. However, little has been explored in semantically distinguishing individual sensor events directly and passing it to the relevant ongoing/new atomic activities. This paper proposes Semiotic theory inspired ontological model, capturing generic knowledge and inhabitant-specific preferences for conducting ADLs to support the segmentation process. A multithreaded decision algorithm and system prototype were developed and evaluated against 30 use case scenarios where each event was simulated at 10sec interval on a machine with i7 2.60GHz CPU, 2 cores and 8GB RAM. The result suggests that all sensor events were adequately segmented with 100% accuracy for single ADL scenarios and minor improvement of 97.8% accuracy for composite ADL scenario. However, the performance has suffered to segment each event with the average classification time of 3971ms and 62183ms for single and composite ADL scenarios, respectively